Armstrong, Robert
* Technology has encouraged us to confuse access to information with knowledge. Education treats teachers as customer-service professionals rather than people who know things that students don’t, and offers students inflated grades, meaningless credentials and a false sense of their own wisdom. Journalists are encouraged to give their audiences what they want, rather than telling them what they need to know. (“What We Think We Know”, Financial Times, 25 March 2017, p. 9; review of Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, 2017)

Blake, William
* The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Bloom, Harold
* If “social energies” wrote King Lear and Hamlet, why exactly were social energies more productive in the son of the Stratford artisan than in the burly bricklayer Ben Jonson? (The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages)

Ciardi, John
* When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same “music,” the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano. (“Translator’s Note”, Dante, The Inferno)

Hannibal
* Trobarem un camí; i, si no, el crearem. (Words said by Hannibal Barca when he had to cross the Alps with 80,000 soldiers and 37 elephants)

Heaney, Seamus
+ So you drive on to the frontier of writing / Where it happens again. (‘From the Frontier of Writing’, The Haw Lantern)
+ Dangerous pavements. / But I face the ice this year / With my father’s stick. (‘I.I.87’, Seeing Things)

Jobs, Steve
* Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world? (trying to convince John Sculley, president of PepsiCo, of going to work at Apple in 1983)
* A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. (BusinessWeek, 1998)

Johnson, Samuel
* Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. (Quoted in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson)
* [On the existence of ghosts] All argument is against it; but all belief is for it. (Quoted in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson)
* The first Whig was the Devil. (Quoted in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson)
* Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true. (Letter to Francesco Sastres)
* A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. […] A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. (Preface to Shakespeare)

Joyce, James
* The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
* My art is not a mirror held up to nature. Nature mirrors my art. (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce)
* When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
* “A nation?” says Bloom. “A nation is the same people living in the same place”. “By God, then”, says Ned, laughing, “if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years”. (Ulysses)
* I am James Joyce. I understand that you are to translate Ulysses, and I have come from Paris to tell you not to alter a single word. (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce)

Milton, John
+ The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. (Paradise Lost)
+ This horror will grow mild, this darkness light. (Paradise Lost)
+ O shame to men! Devil with devil damned / Firm concord holds, men only disagree. (Paradise Lost)

Nabokov, Vladimir
* A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Rabassa, Gregory
* Some time ago, when Gregory Rabassa was translating García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, he was asked by an exceptionally unintelligent interviewer whether he knew enough Spanish to translate the novel. Rabassa’s glorious response was that this was certainly the wrong question. The real question, he said, was whether he knew enough English to do justice to that extraordinary book. (Anecdote told by Edith Grossman in her book Why Translation Matters)
* García Márquez is said to have remarked that he liked my English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude better than his own original Spanish one. (Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents. A Memoir)

Reed, Lou
+ I said, “Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side”. (‘A Walk on the Wild Side’)

Richards, Keith
* I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police.
* I’m a Sagittarius, half-man, half-horse, with a license to shit in the street.
* My epitaph will be: “Fuckers! I told you I wasn’t feeling well!”.

Rolling Stones, The
+ I met a gin soaked, bar-room queen in Memphis, / She tried to take me upstairs for a ride. / She had to heave me right across her shoulder / ’Cause I just can’t seem to drink you off my mind. (‘Honky Tonk Women’)
+ I’m the man that brings you roses when you ain’t got none. […] // Give me a little drink from you loving cup. / Just one drink and I’ll fall down drunk. (‘Loving Cup’, Exile on Main Street)
+ Lonely hearts, they’re not made to break. / I got no spare parts, got no oil to change. // Honey, I ain’t accustomed to lose. / If I want something bad enough, I always find a way to get through. (‘No Spare Parts’, Some Girls)
+ I said yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, / You’ll never make a saint of me. (‘Saint of Me’, Bridges to Babylon)

Scott, Ridley
* I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die. (replicant Roy Batty’s last words in the film Blade Runner)

Shakespeare, William
+ Full fathom five thy father lies. (The Tempest)
+ Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange. (The Tempest)
+ The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. (The Merchant of Venice)
+ My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; […] / I grant I never saw a goddess go; / My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. (Sonnet 130)

Voltaire
* Ara no és hora de crear-se enemics. (Voltaire’s last words, in response to a priest who asked him to abjure Satan before dying)

Wordsworth, William
+ But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, / And frequent sights of what is to be borne! / Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.— / Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. (‘Elegiac Stanzas’)
+ He, to my fancy, had become the knight / Whose tale Cervantes tells; yet not the knight, / But was an Arab of the desert too; / Of these was neither, and was both at once. (The Prelude)

Yeats, William Butler
+ Think where man’s glory most begins and ends / And say my glory was I had such friends. (‘The Municipal Gallery Re-Visited’)
+ Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing, / But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling / To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; / Or set upon a golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come. (‘Sailing to Byzantium’)

Yoda
* If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are… a different game you should play. (Matthew Stover, Shatterpoint)